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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Have you ever bough an external hardrive only to take the disk out of it? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hiya, so am looking to buy more storage and while browsing am seeing some external harddisks, such as Western Digital My Book and Seagate Expansion Desktop for cheaper than the internal harddisks themselves. Have seen this one video from KTZ Systems where he bought up multiple of these external ones just to open them up and use the disks for his own server. Was therefore wondering if you peeps have ever done this and if there any downsides to it at all?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Not specifically, no. When I did change to building my own NAS, I cracked open my older 4TB backup drive to use as a spare.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I haven’t bought them specifically for that, but I have harvested drives from them. A lot of times, you’ll have to destroy the enclosure to get to the drive. If you’re ok with that, go for it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Yup, with 2,5" Seagates. Reused the enclosure with smaller used enterprise ssds to make cheap USB sticks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Indeed. That's how I populated my NAS with 3 10TB drives and saved around 120 dollars total, and this was 4 years ago.

These are the ones I got: https://a.co/d/8x58jBY

The only extra thing was disabling the 3v pin, and that was it. Been running rock solid all this time.

Just make sure to research what disks are in the external housings you're planning on getting, as not all drives need to have pins removed/covered.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I think I'd buy 2nd hand quality server drivers before I'd shuck.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I did once. Well, more along the lines of "what did i buy this thing for, can use the HDD as is". The HDD had additional contact points at the bottom. Don't remember if they worked as is and what i did with them.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Personally I think it's a bad idea

There's lots of things that can go wrong and most of the time those drives are made in super controlled environments because they can be extremely sensitive. It's just not worth the headache

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